Rhyming Prompt: December 27
Imagine the world as you want it to be.
Go on, close your eyes—what do you see?
Do you imagine a planet where everyone’s free
To talk to each other more openly?
Where people consider the feelings of others?
To tell you the truth, if I had my druthers
We’d stop letting some people plunder the earth,
Because everyone would finally see its full worth.
We’d all have less stuff
And while that might be tough
It’s worth it so that we could all have enough.
Let’s make a collage of the world we desire;
Once we visualize it we can aim even higher.
Download the prompts for December 25-28 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience). If you want to get an early start on the last page of printed rhymes, you can download the prompts for December 29-31 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document.
An image of the December 27 prompt printed on cream cardstock with a green border. There is a gold wax impression of a frog in the corner, highlighted in silver. The card is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.
Other Materials:
Magazines, catalogs, old calendars, and anything else you have on hand to cut up for collaging. Glue or glue sticks, scissors, and backing paper will be necessary, too.
Suggested Pose:
Did you know that publishers send galleys of unbound picture books to bookshops, and when the shop’s buyer is finished with them, they just get recycled? Back when I worked at a bookstore as a childless 20-something party monster, I found it incredibly soothing to take those old galleys and cut out the best illustrations, and I have inexplicably carted those cutouts around for a decade. This is finally their moment to shine! If you are not quite as odd as I am, you might want to instead pose your frog with whatever materials you will be using for this activity.
Frantz is sitting on a pile of illustrations that have been cut out. He is holding a pair of children’s scissors in each hand, and has the December 27 prompt on his lap.
Activity:
With your child, cut out images from the materials you have at hand. Then collage those images to create a representation of the empathetic future your child wants to help build. This is essentially a vision board, except instead of envisioning just what they want for themselves, you should encourage your children to visualize what they want for the world as a whole.
Rationale:
In order to find the motivation to work toward a brighter future, we must first visualize what that future might look like. In all of my research on climate action, this idea resurfaced again and again—when we conceptualize a more sustainable, just, and desirable future, we are better able to reverse-engineer a way to make it reality. Psychologist Per Espen Stoknes, for example, identifies five main barriers to climate communication, and asserts that to break through two of them, which he characterizes as denial and the ways in which climate messages are filtered through cultural identity, we need “captivating storytellers who give hope and inspiration, as well as attractive images of a future in which we live with more jobs, higher well-being and lower emissions. If it cannot be imagined, then people will surely not work for it to happen” (2014, p. 168). While we want our children to expand their vision for the future beyond environmental issues, the underlying principle holds: we need to help them know what they’re working toward if we want them to sustain (and expand!) their productive energies.
Book Recommendation:
Today, I’m going to recommend something very silly: 2030: A Day in the Life of Tomorrow’s Kids, by Amy Zuckerman, James Daly, and John Manders. This book uses technology in development to imagine what life could be like for kids in ten years. Are their predictions right? Probably not. But it’s a really fun way to help your kids get into the spirit of imagining the future and dreaming about what might be possible. You can watch a read aloud here.
An image of the cover of 2030: A Day in the Life of Tomorrow’s Kids, by Amy Zuckerman, James Daly, and John Manders.
References
Stoknes, P. E. (2014). Rethinking climate communications and the ‘psychological climate paradox.’” Energy Research & Social Science, 1, 161-170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2014.03.007